Boycott of Israel violates academic freedom

Intellectual freedom and the uninhibited exchange of ideas have become not only staples of American colleges, but a worldwide standard.

The American Studies Association recently spat in the face of such scholarly ideals, voting to boycott Israeli universities. Following an eight-day deliberation in December, the ASA felt it had an ethical obligation to support suppressed academics in Palestine by boycotting Israeli universities. The ASA claimed the latter violated human rights and impeded the work of Palestinian academic studies.

Although the ASA may not be wrong in its accusations of Israel, it is wrong to boycott Israeli universities. Despite the ASA’s claims that the boycott is intended to only limit institutional interaction and not individual communication between academics, it is unrealistic to believe such a sweeping declaration won’t affect relationships between academics themselves.

On the face of it, a boycott from a 4,000-member organization wouldn’t ordinarily generate a reaction. The relatively small association doesn’t impact the academic field substantially and has no official ties to Israeli universities. Still, the ASA has the potential to set a dangerous precedent.

The ASA boycott violates academic freedom; academics’ rights to free association disappear alongside any hope of open and free inquiry and study. If, as the ASA claims, Israeli universities unfairly oppress Palestinian academia, then a parallel curtailment of rights will do nothing to help stop Israel’s alleged abuses.

Rather, the ASA and other academic organizations should foster global connections with Palestinian and Israeli academics if the eventual goal is, as the ASA states, the pursuit of global justice. Only through interaction can change come about — hiding behind an idealistic boycott does nothing but worsen existing problems.

The ASA wishes to systematically accuse all Israeli universities of unethical treatment of Palestinian academia. In doing so, the ASA discredits and ignores those Israeli universities which actively oppose the Israeli government and support Palestinian initiatives. A boycott cuts off communication with Israeli viewpoints — both supportive and critical of Israeli politics — essentially dismantling any opportunity to work toward global justice.

Using the boycott’s logic, it holds that the ASA will move in support of academic boycotts of those countries with policies contrary to its ideals. It holds that the ASA would support a membership that only interacts and studies with those academics who actively support the ASA’s political platforms and social agendas.

In no way does that logic support intellectual freedom and the ability to freely exchange ideas. Letting the boycott stand would force universities to adopt certain political ideologies as a guiding force, no matter how unfair those ideologies are, in order to remain in the ASA and other academic organizations that might follow suit.

Should the boycott remain in place, the line between politically neutral academic study and advocacy becomes blurred. College presidents and boards have every right to work toward the protection of their own. Take, for example, those college presidents who petitioned the U.S. Congress for campus gun control following the shooting at Newtown, Conn.

Academic leaders should not become involved in politics that do not directly affect the pursuits of their colleges. The ASA’s boycott does nothing to protect or advance its members and their academic pursuits but instead hampers potential academic work and solutions.

College of William and Mary President Taylor Reveley and Provost Michael Halleran’s Jan. 3 rejection of the ASA proposal is commendable, but more can and should be done.

The College is an institutional member of the ASA. Luckily, membership isn’t binding. Academic institutions, including the College, should follow the stead of Bard College, Brandeis University, Indiana University, Kenyon College and Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg, all of which withdrew their ASA membership.

The ASA boycott handicaps intellectual freedom. The College should not stand for that.

43 COMMENTS

I know W&M students are too young to remember apartheid South Africa, but boycott was very helpful in bringing about the end of apartheid. Civil society boycotts step in when governments fail. The US government gives Israel $3-4bn a year in unconditional military aid and vetoes every UN Security Council attempt to sanction Israel for its illegal occupation and gross human rights violations. So civil society is doing what it can. And since when did “academic freedom” trump physical freedom, the right not have your home taken at gunpoint and your children arrested in the middle of the night? Boycott is a nonviolent way to try to end the Israeli occupation and we should applaud the ASA.

“Criticism of Israeli government policy is not in and of itself
necessarily anti-Semitic. But what else can we call criticism that selectively
condemns only the Jewish state and effectively denies its right to exist, to
defend itself while systematically ignoring or excusing the violence and
oppression all around it?”

Apartheid?
Then why are Palestinians integrated into all walks of Israeli life. Doctors, lawyers, judges, parliamentarians, restaurant owners, you name it they do it.
Why is your connection to reality so tenuous? Why are you compelled to lie? Why do you hate Jews so much?

Really Apartheid.
Palestinians from the West Bank have equal rights in Israel. Wow that must be news for them. Cruel news, cause they live in apartheid conditions forced on them by Israel. And u pretend otherwise.

Who is forcing what?
Why do you support those who would kill their own? (As is evidenced throughout Islamic countries and goes back to murders within Mohammed’s own family.)

………….

A report issued by the Palestinian Independent
Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) this week criticized the Palestinian Authority [PA] and Hamas for assaults on human rights and freedoms in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The report, which has been ignored by mainstream media and human rights organizations in the West, reveals that 10 Palestinians died in January 2014 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a result of anarchy, lawlessness and misuse of weapons.

The report also lists cases of torture and mistreatment in PA and Hamas prisons. ICHR pointed to an increase in the number of torture cases in prisons belonging to the PA’s much-feared Preventive Security Service in the West Bank.

During January, ICHR wrote that it received 56 complaints about torture and mistreatment in Palestinian prisons: 36 in the Gaza Strip and 19 in the West Bank. In addition, the human rights organization received innumerable complaints about arbitrary and unlawful arrests of Palestinians by the PA and Hamas.

Muslim terrorists have killed 5,000 Buddhists in southern Thailand in the
last five years. Why?

Muslim terrorists have gang-raped, killed, maimed, destroyed and created 500,000 refugees in Mali in the last six months. Why?

Muslim terrorists have slowly but surely destroyed the ancient Coptic
community in Egypt. Why?

Muslim terrorists have slowly but surely wiped out the ancient Hindu
community in Pakistan. Why?

Muslim terrorists have killed or forcibly converted every single Buddhist in Afghanistan – once home to a great Buddhist civilization. Why?

In Nigeria, Syria, Somalia, Tunisia, Algeria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, and
throughout the Muslim world there is anarchy, repression, violence, sadism. Why?

This brings us to Israel (or Kashmir if you prefer). In Israel Muslims call
for the murder of Jews and their supporters rationalize it by saying it is the “only thing they can do since Israel has so emasculated them.”

That’s strange since Muslims are doing – or trying to do – that same thing throughout Africa, Asia and elsewhere.

Why don’t people see the bigger picture, that of Islam being a supremacist religion for whom aggressive jihad has been utilized since Mohammed moved to Medina and started his life-long pursuit for unlimited power no matter what violence was required to achieve it.

So Saudi Arabia (despite its trillions in oil revenue) is a “third world country”. That’s funny.

………….

“To clarify: Wahhabism is the only officially
recognized and allowed religion in Saudi Arabia. Other forms of Islam and other religions are banned and persecuted by the state.

Saudi Arabia is the only Islamic state in which there is no church, no synagogue and no other place of worship of any other religion.

Shiite Muslims have been systematically discriminated
against for decades. Jews are even forbidden to enter the Kingdom.

Saudi Arabia practices a form of Sharia law that is one of the most brutal systems in the world. Saudi Arabia has at all times rejected the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.

Women may not drive a car and can be punished by flogging. Corporal punishment, including amputations and executions, are part of everyday life in the country. Just two weeks ago a Sudanese immigrant in Saudi Arabia was publicly beheaded for ‘sorcery.’ Saudi Arabia is one of the few countries in the world in which the death penalty is enforced even on teenagers,” the paper said.

“Clearly there is much in Mississippi and Alabama to remind South Africans of their own country, yet even in Mississippi we can organise to register Negro voters, we can speak to the press, we can in short organise the people in non-violent action. But in South Africa even the mildest form of non-violent resistance meets with years of imprisonment, and leaders over many years have been restricted and silenced and imprisoned. We can understand how in that situation people felt so desperate that they turned to other methods, such as sabotage.”

I’m drawing a blank here. Could you inform me of the history of “Palestine”?
When did it start? What is its language? What is its constitution? Are Jews allowed to live there? Stuff like that would be helpful.

Israel was legally created in 1948.
Her language is Hebrew.
Arabs live freely in Israel and a Palestinian Arab even serves on Israel’s supreme court. Arabs make up approximately 20% of Israel’s population.
Hope this helps.

o
No Palestinian is being kicked out, but I assume
you are referring to 1948.

The Arabs of Palestine fled at the urging and fear
mongering of their own leaders, who promised that after the Jews were wiped out
they could return. You can listen to their testimonies—their very own words—on
youtube: watch?v=FuGqpFxogRg ; watch?v=cn4r7ZjG9Nc .

In contrast, no Jewish leader told the 850,000
Jews in Arab countries to move out temporarily so the Arabs in their lands can
be exterminated, and then they can return. And in many of these lands, e.g.,
Mesopotamia, the Jews predated the Arabs by more than 1,200 years.

These Jewish refugees were absorbed by Israel,
unlike their 750,000 Arab counterparts who fled Palestine and were refused
settlement and rights among their very own Arab brethren.

By 1950, “Saturday” was largely complete. The Jews
were gone. Today “Sunday” is taking place, and Christians are fleeing Arab
lands in droves. As the current Arab saying goes, “After Saturday comes
Sunday.”

Palestinians could have stayed if they had not
listened to the exaggerated scare stories of Hazam Nusseibeh and Hussayn
Khalidi of the Higher Arab Executive, who had actually intended with their
horror stories to draw in more Arabs to the fight.

The Jews in the Arab countries could NOT have
stayed. It was either fleeing as refugees (and losing an untold fortune that
had been built over many generations) or facing death.

They fled.

They lost all their land, business and property,
and became penniless refugees in Israel.

Apartheid is a psychological warfare and propaganda technique used by Arabs and their water carriers to demonize Israel.

In 1948, the Arabs said they were going to invade Israel, which had at that time “occupied” NO Arab land (Egypt owned Gaza, and Jordan Judea and Samaria), and throw all the Jews into the sea. The Arabs had modern weapons and aircraft, and the Israelis had small arms and a Piper Cub. The Arabs lost because they don’t like to fight armed men, or even armed women. They are pretty good with children, as shown by the Palestinian terrorist who smashed a little girl’s head with a rifle butt.

The Arabs started another war in 1956,
which they lost.

The Arabs started yet another war in 1967, again with the intention of exterminating all the Jews. They lost, and only then did Israel occupy any land. You do realize, of course, that, had a country done the same thing to the U.S. that the Arabs did to Israel, nuclear weapons would have been used in response.

Then the Arabs started another war in 1973: that is four in the space of 25 years. The Palestinians also perpetrated an ongoing litany of mindless terroristic violence, including the Ma’alot school massacre and Munich Massacre.

Then, when Israel turned Gaza over to these people, it gave them greenhouses in which to grow food and build an economy. The Palestinians promptly destroyed the greenhouses, along with synagogues they could have converted into mosques, schools, housing, and so on. Recall that, when the “Terrible” Turks captured Constantinople in 1453, they did not raze the Hagia Sophia; they turned it into a mosque, and even preserved the Christian mosaics which can therefore be seen even today.

All I can say is that the Palestinians
made their own bed, so now they must lie in it. They are also living proof, as in a controlled experiment, that Arab culture is inferior to Euro-American and Judeo-Christian culture. Israelis and Arabs live on similar land that is relatively poor in natural resources, although some Arabs have oil wealth. Israel’s per-capita income is, however, much higher than that of even Saudi Arabia. Maybe it has something to do with women playing an equal and important role in Israeli society, while Saudi religious policemen drove girls back into a burning school because their faces were not covered properly. Maybe it has to do with Israel’s promotion of education and science over religious fanaticism which is what Palestinian children are taught.

While I find it highly questionable that “not a single Israeli academic
institution has petitioned their government to protect the Palestinian right to
education,” perhaps that is because they are too busy giving those
students an education (including building the very Palestinian universities
that didn’t exist until the start of the dreaded “Occupation”).

And the accusation that Palestinians students are “forced to remain
silent or face persecution” would be news indeed to that Tel Aviv
University graduate student Omar Barhouti who has not only benefited from being
enrolled in a world class Israeli university (a subject he would rather not
discuss or have discussed) but is also free to travel the globe as leader of
the BDS “movement” calling for the very school he attends to be
shunned.

This is type of hypocrisy (one which applies to the author of this piece
much more than those she criticizes) that is not just personal but
institutional within a BDS “movement” which devotes limitless time
and energy into demonizing Israelis (including Israeli academics) but cannot
seem to find a moment to help those Palestinians they claim to care for so
much.

mxm,
I know your connection to reality is tenuous, at best, but it is easy to find information proving hundreds of West Bank Palestinians attend Israeli universities.
Yes, they have to go through checkpoints, but that is because so many Palestinians have blown up buses, cafes and even universities requiring checkpoints.
Israel cannot help it if Palestinians embrace death more than life. Israeli didn’t teach them that lesson, Allah did.

So Palestinians can do whatever they want. Blow up buses, slit little girl’s throats, send thousands of rockets into Israel and it’s all cool with you.
But if Israel chooses to protect its citizens against people who do these things it’s not OK with you.
Thanks for helping me understand your thought process {sic}.

While the UN considers war and conquests therefrom to be illegal, Article 52 of the UN Charter provides an exception to the illegality of war in cases involving self-defense. Israel acquired the West Bank (territory illegally seized by Jordan in 1948) through defensive conquest. Since Israel had the legal right to defend itself against aggression, its territorial conquest resulting from a defensive war is legal and binding. There is not a single case in history where a nation was forced to relinquish territory it had acquired through defensive conquest.

Those who condemn settlement activity rely on Article 49, Clause 6 of the Fourth Geneva Convention which states that, “the Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

As previously noted, the claim that Israel is an “Occupying Power” as defined in Article 49 is dubious at best. Israel maintains a valid, legal claim to the West Bank, far superior to those of the Palestinians or any other entity. But even if Israel was to be given the designation of “Occupying Power,” Article 49 would still be inapplicable.

Israel has not transferred or deported any part of its population into the West Bank. Individual Jews, with varied motivations, voluntarily moved into these territories. Moreover, many Israelis were born in the West Bank thus further highlighting the inapplicability of Article 49. Article 49 does not impose on Israel any duty to prevent its citizens from developing or moving into the West Bank.

No, the UN is not a club of morons. It has become a
multi-billion-dollar bureaucracy of career wonks, parasites, moochers, useless diplomats, well-paid support staff, professional courtiers, ass-kissers, flesh-eating zombies, and altruist snobs, paid for largely by U.S. contributions and dues. The UN is a signal instance of how we are paying for our own destruction.

There isn’t a single UN agency that has done a lick of good. It has never solved the “problems” of hunger, disease, and poverty, and never will, because it has a vested interest in perpetuating those things. The only good thing it has done was to approve the creation of Israel, and that was in the way of an apology for the West not having opposed Nazi Germany early enough to prevent WWII, as a kind of compensation for the Holocaust.

No good could ever come from a formal association with what has become a clique of dictatorships, authoritarian régimes, welfare states, and feudal monarchies, for the alleged purpose of advancing “peace.” But ever since its creation the world has seen more strife, turmoil, butchery, misery, and slaughter than in any other period of human history, except perhaps during the Dark Ages, when the competition in death was between disease and savages.

For the last hundred years the best and brightest of the
civilized world have been engaged in the business of peace. In the days before the Nobel Peace Prize became a joke, it was expected that scientific progress would lead to moral progress. Nations would accept international laws and everyone would get together to replace wars with international conferences.

Instead technological progress just gave us better ways to
kill each other. There have been few innovations in the moral technology of global harmony since Immanuel Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” laid out a plan to grant world citizenship to all refugees and outlaw all armies, invasions and atrocities with the whole shebang would be overseen by a League of Nations.

That was in 1795 and Kant’s plan was at least more
reasonable than anything we have two-hundred years later today because it at least set out to limit membership in this body to free republics. If we had done that with the United Nations, it could conceivably have become something resembling a humane organization. Instead it’s a place where the dictators of the world stop by to give speeches about human rights for a show that’s funnier than anything you could find eight blocks away at the Broadway Comedy Club.

More and more of the same gibberish to pretend that Israel does not practice apartheid. Talk about nations “accept international laws” from an Israeli shill is talking about financial planning with a Nigerian email scammer,

mxm,
This is going to be a hard concept for you to understand so read this slowly.
Institutions change.
Institutions change.
Institutions change.
The Un is now run by a bunch of third world despots. The UN has changed.
Now countries like Syria and Libya sit on the Security Council. Institutions change.
Can your teeny-weeny mind understand this concept, or do you still think today’s UN is just like that of 1948?
Silly little child.